


Silent Night

by hafren



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-26
Updated: 2009-11-26
Packaged: 2017-10-03 18:48:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hafren/pseuds/hafren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darkness and silence can be liberating</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silent Night

There is no night in space, but travellers always make one. People need a time when things quieten down, when nothing happens, a time to be alone. To sleep, if they can, but at least to rest. To stop thinking about things, because they can't do anything about them until tomorrow.

You don't sleep much. And nothing, these nights, prevents you thinking about the things you can't alter. You listen to the murmur of the ship, that you never notice during the day, and in your head you replay every plan that went wrong, every argument you lost, every bitter word that you aimed or that scarred you. And every so often you glance over to the pencil-thin beam of light at the edge of your open door.

You always did, only now there's a difference.

\----

When did it start? You recall how you felt, very well, but not what particular encounter had caused it. Had left you bruised and exhausted, sitting on your bed with the light dimmed to almost nothing because your head ached. It might have been the duel on the dead planet, hours of being stalked by pure, obsessive hatred, then coming back to the usual petty quarrels, recriminations, objections to every proposal. You remember wondering if they had a point, if it was indeed preposterously optimistic to think you could change anything. Gazing at that thin line of light by the door and feeling the light of hope was even narrower.

Neither you nor any of your crew slept behind locked doors; you'd all had enough of that in prison. You always liked to leave yours a little open. It didn't startle you when the strip of light widened, with a soft electronic sigh. You even guessed who it was - anyone else would have knocked. For a moment he was sharply outlined against the light, then he touched the door and it whispered shut behind him. 'What is it?' you asked, your heart heavy at the thought of yet another argument, more barbed words.

He crossed over, no more than a shadow in the dark, and sat down beside you. His hands went to your shoulders - a little hesitantly, you thought - and began to massage the base of your neck. It was surprisingly soothing; you sighed as you felt the knots loosen.

'Ah,' you said, 'that feels good.'

At once he laid a finger across your lips. Suddenly all the tension that had flowed out of you seemed to be concentrated in his hands. You went quiet, humouring him, and sensed him relaxing again. His hands worked on your neck, your shoulders. You thought of how his words needled and goaded you all your waking hours, and wondered if he could possibly be feeling remorseful. Maybe this was his way of apologising; maybe that was why words embarrassed him?

Whatever. You leaned back against him, accepting the comfort without further question, and he rocked you, one hand cradling your head, so close that his breath stirred your hair and brushed warmth across your forehead. You gave yourself up to it, drifting into sleep; almost the last thing you were conscious of was him easing you down to the bed and covering you with a blanket. He stood over you for a moment before reaching down and touching your cheek awkwardly; then the door sighed again and he was gone.

You might have thought you'd dreamed it, except that it did not end there. Now and then, often enough after being taunted and defied all day, you would hear that susurrus in the near-dark, and he'd be there. He would gather you in his arms and your own would go around him, so hungry for human contact that sometimes you would hear a little gasp and realise you were gripping too hard. But you knew better now than to apologise. No words. From him or from you. It was clearly a rule. What would happen if you broke it, you didn't know, but you weren't anxious to find out. In case he might leave and not come back.

Whenever he did something for the first time, there would be that little touch of hesitancy, almost as if it were his way of asking permission without words. Then when you let him, it would become natural, as if he had always held your face in both hands and touched his lips to every inch of it, even your closed eyelids. As if it were old habit for him to take one of your curls between two fingers and stroke it, as delicately as a man might handle a bird.

Times you would not forget. The time you were still so angry with him, after the way he'd behaved all day, that you turned away from his touch. And he paused, as if considering how to deal with it, and then slid to the floor and laid his head on your knee. A mediaeval token of fealty, though you were by no means sure that he, not being a history buff like yourself, understood it as such. But you matched it, taking his hands between your own in the gesture that made you his feudal lord, and him your man.

The time you were brooding about what you were capable of, because you knew not only that you could have destroyed a man's hands but that it would have been far from the least enjoyable thing you had ever done. When you stared at your own hands and held back from touching him with them, in case they could not be trusted. And he took them and guided them around his neck, looking up into your face with a rare smile, and total confidence in his eyes.

The first time he let his mouth brush uncertainly against yours, and then would have pulled away, but that you held him still and kissed back. Kissed until you were both breathless, feeling yourself dissolve with pure pleasure, warmed and stroked by his tongue. So slow, so sweet, the mouth you knew as quick and lacerating.

But that was in the light, where words happened. There was something to be said for darkness and silence. So often, he seemed to guess your needs without words, and respond to them with his hands and body in a way he never could have with speech. Oh, there were the times, many of them, when he would stare into your eyes with a kind of desperate, urgent intensity you could not read, and you would be on the edge of asking him what the trouble was. But words were denied, so you held him close and hoped touch would speak for you both. It always seemed to.

Until. You close your eyes against the thread of light. It hurts even to put this into thoughts. Until the room. The room with.

The white room with nothing in it. It is hard to recall, even now. Whiteness, emptiness. Failure. A room full of nothing, an immense nothing that weighed heavy on your chest and filled your head with white noise. The only thing that penetrated it was a voice, a raw, bruised whisper that sounded as anguished as you felt. You heard it and thought: _this is how he would sound, if he spoke to me in the night_.

And suddenly it dawned on you that he was holding you. Cradling you in his arms for all to see, comforting you with his touch. But speaking the words that did not go with contact and darkness. It was as if the night had bled into the day, all the rules broken, and the shock jolted you out of the white nothingness, back to consciousness and the enormity of your defeat.

You thought things couldn't get any worse, and then they did.

With the weight of a wall, the weight of a friend's death on your heart, you sat in the dark, waiting for the touch that would make you forget bitter words and self-reproach, but he did not come. You stayed awake for hours, and by morning you knew he would not come, that he would never come again. That what he was in the night, he could only be as long as he was not forced to hear and see it.

\----

That was weeks ago. By day, things go on much as they did. He pours scorn on your plans, carries them out faithfully, saves your life and hardly utters a word that isn't drenched in vitriol. You can live with all that.

But night is another thing. Sleep eludes you, again, and the dark of your room is full of the dead. Your eyes are prickling with tears, as they did once before when you had been thinking of the past. The time when he caught them on the tip of his tongue, his eyes closed, savouring the salty taste.

Every so often you glance over at the narrow beam of light, hoping it will suddenly widen. But you aren't counting on it.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Dawn Chorus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1138780) by [Willa Shakespeare (AnonEhouse)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonEhouse/pseuds/Willa%20Shakespeare)




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